Tuesday, March 22, 2016

RANDOM THOUGHTS #257

Steve Cole ponders an obscure piece
ofmilitary history that came to his attention.

Everybody knows about the
Japanese-American unit in World War II, the 442nd Regimental Combat
Team, which fought in Italy and later in southern France. A few who
have read more history know about the 100th Separate Infantry
Battalion, the first Japanese-American unit, which was formed from
Hawaiian National Guard troops of Japanese descent. This unit, the
first in combat, was eventually added to the 442nd as an extra
battalion.

I've read over a thousand history books and only
recently discovered the 99th Separate Infantry Battalion, which was
composed of 550 Norwegian-Americans and 450 Norwegians who just
happened to be in the US when Norway was conquered by the Nazis. This
battalion (everyone spoke Norwegian and knew how to ski) was
originally envisioned as being sent into Norway, but instead fought in
France as an extra battalion in various larger units. It was sent to
Norway after the German surrender to supervise disarming the German
units in that country.

The 101st Separate Battalion was to
be formed from Austrians but did not attract enough recruits and was
disbanded.

The 122nd Separate Infantry
Battalion was composed of 650 Greek citizens and Greek-Americans.
After seven months of training it was disbanded as too small but 185
of its members were transferred to the OSS and sent to Greece and the
Balkans as spies. Most of those died in action.

In a
separate program, a battalion of Philippine troops was formed and
later expanded into two entire regiments.

About Me

Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc. is a game-publishing company that creates and publishes games based on the Original Series of Star Trek. We have a contract with Paramount Pictures to do so. Posts and blogs that are not directly related to gaming are the opinions of the individuals who write them, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Amarillo Design Bureau, Inc.